Tag: Schlafly

A couple of months back, the Webster University Film Series announced plans to move its long-running Strange Brew cult film showing from the Crown Room at Schlafly Bottleworks, though a new home was undetermined. At the time, the Schlafly space (long a hub to lunch meetings, internal Schlafly promotions and community events) was about to undergo a size-reducing renovation, due to brewhouse needs.

As it turned out, Strange Brew, long presented by film enthusiast Jon Scorfina, would run a couple of more months at the space, with May’s “Django” the final showing.

In June, everything’s changing for Strange Brew, save for the fact that a brewery will still be involved; “Mallrats” will be the first screening at Strange Brew’s new home in the Grove, at Urban Chestnut Brewing Company’s sprawling facility at 4465 Manchester.

“Schlafly has been incredible in hosting Strange Brew for over a decade,” Scorfina says, “We’ve had so many fun screenings at the Bottleworks and hated to move the venue, but they recently remodeled the Crown Room and it is now too small to meet our needs. Were exited to recreate a similar environment at Urban Chestnut, less than 10 minutes away from the old venue, with a awesome barroom and great beer. Plus, we’re no longer competing with live music at the same time.”

(In full confession mode, my own attendance at the event was always immediately followed by a trip into the main barroom to watch Miss Jubilee for a set, or two, but the sound bleed-through was always there, true enough.)

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Scorfina doesn’t quite date back to the days when the then-Cinema in the City was hosted at Beatnik Bob’s in the City Museum. But he has been “hosting the event since 2007 (and it’s) still one of my favorite things to do. We take chances on cult films that you don’t see pop up as often at the Tivoli midnight movies and it is always exciting to see the audience who show up for the movie, especially if they’re super fans.”

As for the selection of “Mallrats”: this time it’s personal.

Scorfina, “as a former Crestwood mallrat, I couldn’t be more excited to relive this part of Gen X culture that is slowly fading away with the rise of Amazon. The malls are soon to be ghost towns. As far as ‘Mallrats’ I also suffer from never being able to figure out those stupid Magic Eye posters so this movie ‘gets me.’”